Linux 5.16-rc2 Released - "Felt Pretty Normal"

Linus Torvalds just issued the second release candidate of Linux 5.16 following the closure of the merge window last Sunday.

Overall, Linux 5.16-rc2 is rather uneventful. No big scary pull requests arrived this week nor anything else to worrisome... There is the situation of the cluster-aware scheduling hurting Alder Lake but that is being worked on and looks like it will be disabled or so in time for the Linux 5.16 stable release around the start of the new year.

Linus Torvalds simply wrote in the 5.16-rc2 announcement:

Nothing especially noteworthy stands out for the last week, it all felt pretty normal for a rc2 week.

The commit stats look normal, and the diffstat looks fairly regular too. There's perhaps relatively less driver diffs than usual, partly explained by the tools subdirectory diff being larger than usual (a quarter of the whole thing), mostly just due to added kvm tests. The rest is arch updates, filesystems, networking, documentation etc...

So fixes a bit all over the place, with nothing that really stands out. Details below in the shortlog.

See the Linux 5.16 feature overview to find out the exciting features of this next kernel version.